Published: June 27, 2008 11:48 pm            

Variety of projects keep Geistown senior busy

At 81, Betty Miske of Geistown isn’t thinking about slowing down.

“I got my fingers in everything – from wine making, jelly making, gardening and quilting,” she stated.

Miske has an interesting way of looking at the passing years.

“I work my life around the seasons,” she said.

“In the spring, you make the garden. In the summer, you repair and paint. In the fall, you make jelly and wine.

“In the winter, from 1 to 4 p.m. five days a week, you find me in my sewing room. I love to quilt. I have about 65 right now.”

Miske also plays bingo once a week.

“I just started that in my old age,” she said. “You’ve got to get out among the people. If you stay in the house you grow old quick.”

Miske said she was taught how to make wine 51 years ago by a local winemaker.

“I make some of the best wine you ever tasted. I never had a bad batch, ever.”

She said her wine is all natural.

“The only thing in that wine is sugar, water, grapes. That’s it.

“It’s good for your blood,” she claimed.

Miske learned from a young age to be self-sufficient.

“During the Depression, we had to live off the earth,” she recalled.

She raises onions “the size of softballs.”

Miske also is very proud of her potatoes – one of which grew to nearly 4 pounds.

“That was amazing,” she said.

“I saved that and then I planted the tentacles. I’ll bet you I got 25 potatoes out of that hole.”

Miske is not sure what her secret is. She wonders if it is the soil or if she is just lucky.

One thing she knows for sure. It is nothing artificial.

“Chemicals, no. I don’t use chemicals in my body and no chemicals in the garden.”

Miske also enjoys working with flowers and is quite proud of the 170 Rose of Sharon plants that surround her house.

“I take care of them myself,” she said.

“I cut them back every fall and haul them away. I don’t want a tree. I want a hedge.”

Miske lives in the same house she and her husband built when they were newly married.

“We built it from the ground up by ourselves,” she said. “We never had an electric saw or anything.”

It was one of several the couple constructed.

Miske worked on her first house with her father when she was in her teens.

It was made of fieldstone.

“I picked every stone for that from land that is now The Galleria,” Miske said.

Her desire to work caused her to get into a little trouble with the law once.

She and her husband were putting the roof on a house.

Not normally a big deal, but Miske was eight months pregnant at the time.

A neighbor called the police – worried that the mother-to-be should not be on a roof.

Miske said the police officer told the lady to go to her back porch if she couldn’t stand to watch.

“Work never killed nobody that I know of,” Miske said.

Maybe it is that attitude that has kept her so healthy.

Miske said she hasn’t had a headache in her life and has never taken prescription medicine.

“People take too much medicine,” she said.

Miske had several jobs through the years but the one she liked best was driving a school bus.

“I drove for over 37 years and, oh, I loved it!”

“There’s no bad children in the world, there’s just bad parents,” the mother of three commented.

“A child is the most precious thing you can have. In the flick of an eyelid, they’re gone.”

Miske was married to her husband, Paul, for 52 years until his death in 2000.

“Him and I were just friends and buddies,” she recalled. “We never fought once.”

She thinks she knows why they got along so well.

“The secret to that is – he thought he was the boss, but he wasn’t. I was.”

        

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